Former YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, made international headlines after they were arrested on charges of child abuse on August 23. The charges against Franke and Hildebrandt are deeply disturbing, including allegations that they abused and starved Franke’s two youngest children, who were found malnourished and with signs of abuse after one child escaped the home from a window and sought help from a neighbor.
This particular case is gaining quite a bit of attention because Franke and her family were behind a prominent YouTube channel called 8 Passengers. While Franke deleted the channel shortly before her arrest, it accumulated over 2.5 million subscribers over seven years and earned millions of views. Franke’s husband, Kevin, worked as a professor at Brigham Young University, but the family’s primary source of income was YouTube. The couple was estimated to be worth several million at the height of 8 Passengers. Meanwhile, the children provided all the content for 8 Passengers. Their daily lives were filmed and put on camera, and the children were granted no privacy in their own home.
Unfortunately, the children received no compensation for their contribution to the channel. What’s worse is that Franke’s youngest children were allegedly denied basic necessities, including food and water, despite their parents becoming millionaires by filming them. It’s a horrific situation that indicates the worst-case scenario for family vloggers. However, it is a prime example of how family vloggers are exploiting their children through YouTube and why the platform needs to put an end to it.
YouTube fails to terminate exploitative family channels
The problem of family vloggers exploiting children is so significant of an issue that legislation is desperately needed to protect these children. April and Davey, YAWI Vlogs, The Leroys, and The Ballinger family are just a few examples of these channels where parents don’t have outside jobs, and family vlogging is their primary income. While it can’t always be verified whether these families set anything aside for their children out of the profits, many are open about not helping their children financially and requiring them to get additional jobs once they’re old enough, despite already essentially working for their parents by being on YouTube.
The same laws that protect child actors are needed to protect the children of YouTubers. However, until these laws are in place, YouTube needs to take action against the exploitation on its platform. Unfortunately, the platform has repeatedly failed to take action against these vloggers. Child abuse allegations actually first arose against Franke in 2020, sparking a Child Protective Services investigation. Franke spoke openly in vlogs about depriving her children of food as a punishment and taking away her child’s bed for seven months. However, the channel remained monetized and posted regularly for two more years. Any channel associated with child abuse should be permanently banned from the platform, though this usually doesn’t happen.
In 2017, YouTube terminated the DaddyOFive channel after the parents, Mike and Heather Martin, filmed themselves playing cruel and abusive pranks on their children. The pair lost custody of two of their children and were both convicted of child neglect. However, they have repeatedly returned to YouTube, and the platform seemingly gave up on terminating their accounts. The Martin Family is currently active on YouTube with 70k subscribers and continues to feature the family’s minor children, showing that even those convicted of child abuse can continue exploiting their children on the platform.
Meanwhile, in 2017, dozens of these vlogging families were demonetized for violating YouTube’s policy that prohibits “harmful and dangerous content involving minors.” Many of these channels were demonetized for showing children in vulnerable situations, such as fear, sickness, or pain. The majority of these channels deleted the offensive content and were monetized again. However, most of them have returned to posting their children with injuries, sick, crying, or in other vulnerable situations with no further consequences.
Some creators, like Johnny Tanner and Davey Orgill, responded by simply making new channels after their previous ones were demonetized or terminated for violating YouTube’s policies on content featuring minors. Orgill ran a now-deleted channel called Kids Try before launching April and Davey, while Tanner turned his demonetized Tannerites channel into a YouTube Kids channel and created the additional YAWI Vlogs by Tannerites channel to continue monetizing his family vlogging. These examples show that YouTube often fails to enforce its guidelines or ensure that offending YouTubers stay off the platform after being terminated.
If YouTube were to enforce its guidelines effectively, it would likely significantly reduce the number of exploitative family vloggers on the platform or, at the very least, would afford children a bit more privacy and prevent them from having their most personal and vulnerable moments posted publicly. However, YouTube could also end the problem if it merely made it a policy that content featuring children can’t be monetized. It seems odd that content featuring minors could ever generate a profit in the first place, considering the countless ways this could be exploited. YouTube should have never made it possible for a parent to potentially enjoy millions from their children’s labor while denying those children basic living necessities. The platform has long needed to take action against the child exploitation it is riddled with, and the Franke case shows just how urgent the situation is.
(featured image: screengrab/8 Passengers)
